How many of these articles are there going to have to be before there is some change to the way that we think about and practice medicine.

At least this time the drug in question, a heart medication called Natrecor, wasn’t found to be harmful, merely ineffective. Which, in these days of deadly drugs, is beginning to seem like a blessing.

Take a moment, read this article in The New York Times. It should alarm you. It should make you mad. It should make you want to do something so that this stops.

The most alarming part of the article for me is one simple little sentence: “The drug, nesiritide, brand name Natrecor, was approved after small studies in carefully selected patients.” Small studies with carefully selected subjects yield untrustworthy results. Unsafe results. Our lives are at stake and yet our government pays more attention to the demands of the pharmaceutical companies than to our needs as patients and as citizens.

When the drug was tested in a large unbiased study, the results were different. The story states: “Once again, small studies give us the wrong answers,” said Dr. Robert M. Califf, a Duke cardiologist who directed the large study.

Even the allopathic doctors are aware with the flaws in our medical studies. Small studies give us the wrong answers. They give us the answers that the drug companies have purchased in setting up the studies. And they give us ineffective and unsafe drugs.
This needs to stop.